Lewis & Clark — do you remember those names from elementary school history
books?
Tonight, on public television, a documentary film (the second part of two-hour
segments) entitled Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery,
will be shown. If this second segment is anything like the first segment, which
aired last evening, you won’t want to miss it. It is not only a valuable historical
travelogue, but there are spectacular shots of landscapes of the Great Plains,
the awesome Rockies, and the Pacific Northwest.
Equally fascinating is the local connection in the documentary as we meet
the Shoshone Indian girl Sacajawea, who is shown leading the expedition through
the unexplored, trackless country where she was raised as a child before being
kidnapped by a hostile neighboring tribe.
Sacajawea, you may remember, was married to Touissant Charbonneau, uncle to
Michael Charbonneau, Tupper Lake’s first settler.
In May 1804, Meriweather Lewis, his friend William Clark and four dozen other men set off on an expedition that would take them almost two-and-a-half years to complete. Their mission was to study the unexplored lands along the Missouri River and to find a water passage to the Pacific. They traveled upstream the entire length of the Missouri, a distance of 2,700 miles. It was an inconceivably arduous undertaking and one can only imagine their shock and despair when they got their first look at the Rockies (which they expected to be only foothills), an endless fortress of forbidding snow-capped peaks that stretched to the horizon.
This was one of the most momentous and coveted expeditions in American history. How did Touissant Charbonneau join this expedition whose size was purposefully kept small so they would not alarm Indians to the point of active war and whose members were so carefully selected?
We learn something about it from Clark’s notes, in which he writes that “a
French man by name Chabonoh . . . visit us, he wish to hire and informed us
his 2 squars were Snake Indians . . . “
This uncle of Tupper Lake’s first settler was a trader who first started working
for the North West Trading Co. (competitor to Hudson Bay Trading Co.) at the
time he was living among the Hidatsas Indians as an independent trader. His
squaws or “wives” were Shoshones or Snakes from a band that lived in the Rocky
Mountains at the headwaters of the Missouri. They were teenagers who had been
captured by a Hidatsas raiding party. Charbonneau had won them in a bet with
the warriors who had captured them.
The historian Stephen Ambrose relates that “Lewis & Clark eagerly accepted
Charbonneau’s offer to sign on as an interpreter, not so much for his own sake
but because his wives could speak the language of a mountain tribe. So on the
spot they signed up Charbonneau and one of his wives. He chose Sacajawea, who
was about 15 years old and six months pregnant.
History records that this was a wise move. Sacajawea proved invaluable not
only as an interpreter, but also in her memory and ability to guide them through
the unexplored wilds of the upper Missouri.
Lewis & Clark both, it may be worth noting, have been criticized for not employing her expertise even more, a failure, it has been suggested, because of the chauvinistic attitude so prevalent at the time.
Touissant is not treated as kindly. For one thing, he was a poor boatsman afraid of the water, and his inept boat handling several times caused great concern to Lewis (many valuable supplies were in his boat). He was also quite argumentative, often quarreling over trifling matters with Jessuame, the expedition’s mulatto who had to interpret Charbonneau’s French since he spoke no English. Nevertheless, despite these disapprobations (and his moral values), he must have been a resourceful and rugged individual. Certainly his nephew Michael must have been of that ilk. In 1840, at a time when there were no other settlers anywhere near, he cleared a patch of ground where the present day Racquette River Drive makes a bend in the road near the river (near Mary Alice Burns’ residence) and built a cabin. That same summer he made a trip back through the wilderness to the Champlain Valley, stopping along the way to cut and stack wild hay. When the lakes were frozen the next winter he brought back some cattle, driving them through the woods and stopping to feed them on the “catches” of hay.
Charbonneau’s wife and children sustained themselves for months in a trackless wilderness until his return. The Tupper Lake Charbonneau name was later Anglicized to Cole (Charbon is French for coal).
One of the Charbonneaus’ (Cole) daughters had the distinction of being the first bride here. In 1850 she was married on an island in Big Tupper Lake just over the Franklin-St. Lawrence County line, known locally as Sally’s Rock, located ironically enough near the site in Grindstone Bay, where a million-dollar plus “camp” is presently being built for the Klingenstein and Simkins families.